Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 24 September 2025
Committee on Disability Matters
Inclusive Education for Persons with Disabilities: Discussion (Resumed)
2:00 am
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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Apologies have been received from Senator Nikki Bradley. The purpose of today's meeting is the continuation of the discussion about inclusive education for people with disabilities. I extend a warm welcome on behalf of the committee to Ms Derval McDonagh, chief executive officer; and Ms Lucinda Murrihy, head of strategy and innovation, Inclusion Ireland; Mr. Tiernan O'Neill, principal of Corpus Christi Primary School and Dr. Lindsey Liston, chairperson of Corpus Christi Family Centre, Moyross; and Mr. Ciarán Cronin, principal, and Mr. Jim Shanahan, chairperson of the board of management of St. James' primary school.
Before we begin, I will read a note on privilege and housekeeping matters. I remind all witnesses of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity, by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that may be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks by myself. It is imperative they comply with any such direction. The evidence of witnesses physically present or who give evidence from within the parliamentary precinct is protected pursuant to both the Constitution and statute by absolute privilege. I remind members of the constitutional requirements that in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex. Members of the committee attending remotely must do so from within the precinct of Leinster House. In this regard, I remind any member partaking via Microsoft Teams that they should be on the grounds of the Leinster House campus.
A wide range of issues will be under discussion today. If necessary, further and more detailed information on certain issues raised can be sent to the clerk to the committee for circulation to members. I call on Ms Derval McDonagh to make her opening statement.
Ms Lucinda Murrihy:
I thank the Chair and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak today. I represent Inclusion Ireland, a national human rights organisation working for an Ireland where people with an intellectual disability live and participate equally. Today, I also speak as a parent, carrying the lived reality of my children’s experiences of our education system. From this place, where human rights and human stories meet, Inclusion Ireland’s position is clear: all children should have the real chance to go to school together. Families tell us that when schools foster belonging, safety follows, and safety unlocks learning. However, when belonging is absent, the consequences are stark. Every September, our phone lines become busy with families telling us of reasonable accommodations denied and how they are pressed, though rarely in writing, to move their children elsewhere. They tell us of children told to stay home until they can follow the rules. Families were told to make their home less secure so their child would want to attend school.
According to the wider data we gathered from families echoes these stories, only 14% of disabled children we surveyed last year were thriving in school; 27% have experienced restraint at school; 68% struggled with school rules never designed for them, yet more than half were punished for not following them. For children, the impact is life changing. School for some can feel like survival and impossibly far from ever accessing their right to a high-quality education. At times, anxiety grows so severe that parents make the only decision you would, which is to remove their child to protect their welfare. As a result, children are driven in separate taxis past their local school while others walk by, absorbing a silent message that disability does not belong in this community. No departmental data captures this reality and families are left to complain only to schools themselves, a process so unsafe that many stay silent. Children's voices are erased.
If we are serious about inclusive education, we cannot continue with a system that protects itself over children. That is why 74% of Inclusion Ireland’s members are calling for complete reform. This means stopping more of the same and codesigning a new system with disabled children, their families, disabled persons organisations, DPOs, and advocates as part of Ireland’s obligations to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNCRC. The Department must collect and publish disaggregated national data on disabled children's experiences, including suspensions and restraints, so progress can be measured and schools held accountable. Complaints must be heard by an independent body. Policies must be neuro-affirming and just. Barriers must be dismantled so families can trust their child will be included and schools are equipped to educate all children with nationwide, in-school therapy teams, as part of that capacity.
Bias runs deep, rooted in generations who never went to school alongside disabled peers. Change requires transformational investment in training for staff and students, and a commitment that schools learn daily from disabled children who are the experts in their own difference. A reform system means belonging, not special, but the same; the same right to attend a local school; the same chance to learn alongside non-disabled peers, who learn the most important lesson of all: every human life is equal and every child belongs.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
I thank the Chair and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak today on behalf of Corpus Christi Primary School and our family centre in Moyross, Limerick. Dr. Liston and I are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this crucial conversation on inclusive education for children with disabilities.
I have spent almost 25 years working in Moyross and can state honestly there is a huge gap between policy and practice when it comes to inclusion. On paper, Ireland has made great strides. We have the NCSE's continuum of support and ambitious statements on inclusion, and every policy document says the right things, but in reality what happens in classrooms and families' lives does not match the promises.
In Corpus Christi School, if it were not for philanthropically funded initiatives like the Sky Is The Limit and HAPPEE, we would we be unable to meet our students' needs. That is not rhetoric; it is fact. These projects are also partly financially supported through the economic and social intervention fund under Limerick Regeneration, a funding stream that comes through the Department of housing and that is now, bizarrely, under imminent threat of ceasing. Rethink Ireland has also supported our therapeutic initiatives, the funding sourced from the Department of rural and community development. Both projects are prime examples of what is possible when philanthropic sources and the Government come together. However, here is the uncomfortable truth: it is not fair or sustainable if children's life chances depend on whether their school can attract philanthropy or whether their teachers have time to fill out endless applications and strategic planning documents and produce financial reports. We spend hours fundraising and pitching just so our children can access therapy and well-being supports. This is time taken away from teaching and learning. No child's access to education should depend on charity or chance.
When schools cry out for flexibility, what we get are more restrictions, the most recent example being the new SNA guidelines for 2025–26. These guidelines, rather than supporting inclusion, risk narrowing it further. They allow for only a six-week application window each year, but children's lives do not fit into a six-week window. New diagnoses, midyear enrolments or changes in circumstances will not wait for reform in September. The guidelines redefine and narrow complex needs, effectively excluding many children whose greatest challenges are behavioural or emotional. Every teacher in the country knows these needs are real. Writing them out of the criteria will not make them disappear.
Schools are told they must provide evidence of use of the new Relate document to qualify for review. Relate has potential to be a powerful tool, but as of now there has been almost no training or embedding. Instead of being a supportive framework, it risks becoming a compliance stick to beat schools with.
Ultimately, the overall framing feels focused on rationing and gatekeeping, not on enabling children's access to support. Parents, teachers, and SNAs were not properly consulted when drafting these guidelines. The fear now is that they will reduce supports, not enhance them. It is but another example of the chasm that exists between policy and the lived reality.
We already know what works. The evidence is clear: children achieve better outcomes when supports are embedded on site in schools. Children feel safer in a familiar environment. Parents engage more willingly with a school than with a clinic, and therapies can be woven into the natural rhythm of the school day. In our school, attendance at occupational therapy and speech therapy is 100%, because those sessions take place in the building. There is no travel, no stigma and no missed appointments. When professionals are based in schools, true multidisciplinary teamwork happens. We sit at the same table, plan together and intervene in the child's real learning environment. That is inclusion in action.
Our national system is out of balance. According to figures from the Department of public expenditure and reform, management and administrative grades in the HSE have grown by more than 35% since late 2019. Meanwhile, families in Moyross and across Ireland wait months and years for therapies. We are drowning in administrators while children go without speech therapy, occupational therapy and counselling. That imbalance is indefensible. Other countries show us what can be done. In Canada, school-based occupational therapy has cut waiting times dramatically while increasing participation. In Australia, teachers are trained to embed basic speech and language strategies into their daily teaching, extending the reach of therapists. In the US, the City Connects programme has shown that wrapping services around children in schools improves academic outcomes and well-being. Ireland should not be lagging behind. The knowledge and evidence already exist. What is missing is the political will to implement consistently.
We also need to face a difficult truth. Placing a child with significant needs into a mainstream classroom without the proper supports is not inclusion; it is setting them up to fail. True inclusion means that resources travel with the child. At present, too many supports are tied to diagnosis, which creates bottlenecks and unnecessary labelling. While children wait on lists, they lose months and years that can never be given back. What children need is support that is available the moment it is clear they are struggling, not months or years later, and not only if they have a formal diagnosis. Inclusion should mean early, flexible and practical help that actually meets children where they are.
In Corpus Christi, through the Sky Is The Limit and our family centre, we have been able to offer therapies, family learning and well-being supports on site. The results are transformative. Children who were written off have re-engaged, families who felt isolated have found connection, and parents who struggled have grown in confidence. However, I must stress this happened only because we fought for it. We fundraised, we applied, we pitched and we begged. That is not how a system should work. No child should depend on bake sales or charity funding for therapy. Every child should have guaranteed access to wraparound support, regardless of where they live or what school they attend.
Too often, the first question becomes “What is the label?” or “What is the diagnosis?” when the real question should be, “What does this child need right now?”. Many of the behaviours we see in classrooms are just as likely to come from trauma, stress or poverty as from a medical condition. Before anything else, children need connection, predictability, and trust. That is what helps them regulate and learn. While technology has its place, especially in the context of accessibility, it cannot take the place of relationships or the basics of learning. Since the Covid pandemic, we have seen the impact of too much screen time, namely falling concentration and weaker social skills. Technology should complement not replace the human connections that really drive growth.
Inclusion is possible. We see it every single day when wraparound supports are in place. Children thrive, families flourish, and teachers feel empowered, but at present too many children are being left behind while schools scramble for philanthropic funding or navigate rigid circulars. If we are serious about inclusive education, the State must stop rationing and start investing. I will finish with words attributed to Gandhi: “You can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members.”
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Mr. O'Neill. He will have an opportunity to come back in again. I invite Mr. Cronin to make his opening statement.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
I thank the Cathaoirleach and members for inviting us to this meeting of the Joint Committee on Disability Matters. It is a privilege to be asked here today to take part in this conversation. My name is Ciarán Cronin and I am the principal of St. James's Primary School. Our school is a DEIS band 1 school situated between the Guinness brewery and St. James's Hospital in Dublin 8. We have 280 pupils, 16 mainstream classes and two special classes for children with autism. We have 31 teachers and 12 SNAs, and every day we welcome children of 41 different nationalities and 15 different religions. We also have 33 children experiencing homelessness or living in IPAS accommodation. Our school has the Early Focus project to help support the pupils' emotional needs and is a member of the Dublin 8 Liberties school completion programme.
As a principal, I am proud when I see amazing interactions between teachers, SNAs and students every day. I am always blown away by my dedicated staff's ability to always go the extra mile to support the students who need extra help in our school. Our school is such a happy place, and it is great to see so many smiling pupils come through our doors. It is an amazing environment where children can feel safe, happy and engaged in learning daily.
The main points I will talk about today are staffing, parental support, our two wonderful autism classes, appropriate school places, school transitions and how we have experienced these in our school. In our school, we provide special educational support to roughly 40% of the children in our care. This may include the special class for children with autism, support from a special education teacher, and support for children who are learning English as an additional language and children who are receiving support from an SNA. Sinéad Fowler, who is here with us, is the special educational needs co-ordinator for our school and every year she has the unenviable task of piecing together timetables for special education teachers and SNAs to try to share the loaves and fishes so every child entitled to support gets some. This is made even harder by the unpredictable enrolments that take place at the beginning of and throughout the school year.
As a DEIS school, and in the tradition of the Religious Sisters of Charity, we pride ourselves on our willingness to go the extra mile to help the parents and pupils of our school. The home school community liaison is a full-time position in our school whereby a teacher is seconded to a role within the school to support parents. Often, this will be to support parents who find different aspects of their child's education daunting. It does not get more daunting than trying to negotiate the children's disability network system or trying to get your child assessed through the assessment of need process.
So much of our time is spent supporting families to access these supports and fill in paperwork. Those who are not taken into account are the families with literacy issues, families who are homeless and living in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation, and families who do not have access to technology and who, for many reasons, may change their phone numbers up to two or three times per year. These families may wait up to four years on a waiting list to access supports for their children and then, due to the above reasons and others, may miss their appointments. Unfortunately, after missing a number of appointments, they will be discharged from the system and the school will be put under pressure to start the whole process again. A solution needs to be identified in this regard.
It is frustrating that people do not listen to schools. When schools and voices in education come together to ask for funding for certain things, we usually get a positive response. In the context of supporting students in our schools with special educational needs, however, it is not money we need but more people. We need more SNAs and teachers to support children with special educational needs. It is as simple as that. If we want to be serious about supporting the most vulnerable children in our schools and providing genuinely inclusive education, we need more SNAs. However, the most recent guidelines regarding the review of SNA allocations for this year, which were mentioned by Mr. O'Neill, have been met with despair among school leaders, who are concerned they will result in a reduction in SNAs and a subsequent impact on the education we can provide.
In our school we have two special classes for children with autism. They are two amazing, vibrant classes with dedicated teachers and SNAs and amazing children who come in every day with a smile. We could fill two more special classes with children from our mainstream classes but, like most schools, we are short on classrooms and appropriate spaces to turn into autism classes – "appropriate" being the key word here. It is frustrating to hear about schools being made to open special classes this year at the loss of rooms used as libraries, breakfast clubs and well-being rooms.
I am joined today by Ms Yvonne Kealy, one of our autism class teachers, who has been so dedicated to her class for the last number of years. However, every year, I have had to advertise to get a teacher to work in the other autism class. Currently, the majority of applicants for special class teaching positions are Spanish. I have had two Spanish women teach in our ASD classes and they have been incredible. However, due to Teaching Council restrictions, they cannot become long-term members of school staff despite their skills and expertise. How these roles are filled on a long-term basis needs to be looked at because many schools find themselves still recruiting special class teachers well into September each year. All children are entitled to attend their local primary school but principals too often find themselves having to tell parents realistically what supports they can and cannot put in place for their child.
Schools like ours have to look for private funding through our early focus project to enlist the help of occupational therapists and psychologists in upskilling staff to feel more confident in their abilities to support children of all needs in their class. More and more, we are seeing children who cannot sit in their seats, constantly fidget and squirm and require movement breaks to get out of their classroom and stretch their legs in order to meet their sensory needs. This is a huge issue in many schools, with staff becoming creative and setting up sensory corners with exercise bikes, yoga balls and mini-trampolines just to help children be able to go back into the classroom and concentrate. As with anything, this is dependent on having staff to do it.
One thing that frustrates me every year is children in our autism class who are moving from sixth class into secondary school. Most of the students in our school finish sixth class having visited their new school several times, but our special class students with autism do not know where they will be and often it takes a whole year to find an appropriate school place for them. The NCSE has put in place a 1 October deadline for notification of a child with autism who needs a school place. This requires an up-to-date psychological assessment stating they still require a place in a special class. That is another process that assumes their parents have good literacy skills and access to scanners and are computer literate. It is another potential barrier for vulnerable families who have enough on their plates.
I look forward to engaging with members in an open and honest discussion about what can be done to make schools genuinely inclusive. Thank you.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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Thank you very much, Mr. Cronin. I invite members of the committee to put their questions. When I call members to speak, they should adhere to the agenda item under discussion. Each member has seven minutes in the opening round. First is Deputy Healy.
Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Independent)
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I thank the Cathaoirleach, and the witnesses for the various presentations. It was particularly informative to hear the schools' presentations. This issue is something we come across almost every day of the week, particularly in relation to assessments of need, access to the school transport system and the availability of staff. One issue that all the witnesses have raised this morning is the reassessment and new guidelines for SNAs. Will they indicate what the new guidelines mean in practice in schools? What will change on a daily basis under these new guidelines? What difficulties arise as a result of the guidelines in the normal day-do-day running of a school?
The question of suspensions came up. We often have parents coming to us about this. A child gets a place in a school, special school or unit but after a number of weeks or even a shorter period, for whatever reason it is found to be impossible to continue the education of that child in the school. How can we overcome that difficulty?
The delay in getting assessments of need raises difficulties for parents and children in accessing the services they require. Will the witnesses address a few of those questions?
Ms Derval McDonagh:
Thank you, Deputy. I will come in on the topic of suspensions. It is related to reduced school days as well. I have been looking at the information and data that are out there. This is something we need to take really seriously. The data shows that 65% to 66% of children on reduced school days are disabled. That tells us something about what is happening in the system, and that has risen year on year.
Unfortunately, there are no disaggregated national figures on suspensions of disabled children. We have general figures on suspensions but we do not know the level of issue. All we can do is put forward what is coming through from our advocacy work with children and families. We hear about these issues every day. I am glad to be sitting beside representatives of two schools who are speaking of inclusion and "Rights, not charity". We subscribe to the way of thinking that all children belong in their local schools. That will take a co-ordinated strategic plan for inclusive education, and at the forefront of that plan need to be the voices of children and their families. As our colleagues in the school system are telling us, teachers on the ground are also the experts in this.
We need to bring together stakeholders to co-design what that will look like so that, step by step, we make improvements in the system. Some of that is about bringing in more resources to the system, some of it is reimagining and rethinking how we use resources and some of it is building resources into the system that we have not thought of yet, such as using teaching assistants in schools and developing other learning supports in our school system.
We know this will not happen overnight but we need to see a documented, co-ordinated, cross-government-agreed plan to make these improvements year on year. Children cannot wait for that to happen. We understand research is being done in that space. There is an opportunity with the new convention on education for a public conversation over the next eighteen months about the future of our schools, imagining what all schools need to look like so that all children can belong. We need to listen to the experts on this: children, families and the people delivering the school system on the ground.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
I thank the Deputy for his questions. To further articulate the points already made, it is about joined-up thinking across Departments. It is not rocket science. It really is not, if we can create a cross-departmental coalition of the willing.
The Deputy raised an interesting question around assessments of need. The waiting list for those will be close to 25,000 by the end of the year. Children are floundering on lists. The old adage is that time waits for no man, but it certainly does not wait for children with additional needs.
We have tried to be creative on the ground. At times it is not so much about money. It is about how we better co-ordinate and align resources. There are lots of money and resources there but it is so disparate and the systems are so disconnected.
I will give an example of how we in Limerick have tried to join the dots. The socioeconomic context in Limerick city is quite stark. According to the CSO data, seven of the ten most disadvantaged electoral districts in the country are still in Limerick city. Marry that socioeconomic context with a child with additional needs. A lot of the children we work with, similar to Ciarán's experience, are really swimming against the tide. Homelessness, addiction and poverty, married with additional need - it is a very difficult landscape for many of our children. We have looked at creative ways to engage additional supports and services whereby, as was alluded to already, schools become hubs for the delivery of services.
An example of that would be the HAPPEE initiative we ran. It is an acronym for the Health Alliance for Practice-based Professional Education and Engagement. In Limerick, we are very fortunate to have the school of allied health in the University of Limerick. We have a pipeline of trainee occupational therapists, speech therapists and physiotherapists looking for clinical placements. Schools are very much a natural habitat for these placements. The issue was that no clinical supervision could be provided because we did not have occupational therapists or speech therapists in the schools to provide the clinical oversight. Through the economic and social intervention fund, which was enabled through the regeneration programme in Limerick, we accessed funding that enabled us to work with the local child disability network team, which is doing tremendous work but has been so frustrated by the waiting lists. Children were foundering on waiting lists with very little therapeutic support. We secured funding that enabled some of its staff to be seconded to a programme where they provide clinical supervision to trainee therapists coming into schools. Six of the most disadvantaged schools in the country were able to facilitate 98 student placements in the past two years. Students came into schools for ten-week and 12-week blocks and provided universal supports and targeted supports under the clinical supervision of OTs, SLTs and physios. It is very simple but it works well. Not alone did the clinicians leave less frustrated, because they were achieving something, there was a pipeline of children coming into an environment children were comfortable in. Parents were coming to appointments in the school. The children were much happier not having to leave the school. They were much more comfortable in their own environment. As well, we were building teacher capacity. We were not looking for teachers to become therapists but just building their capacity. There is a legacy piece there as well for teachers. We joined up the dots, we worked more cohesively and more coherently. The answers are not that complex. They really are not.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Deputy Healy. We will move on to the next speaker from the Independents.
Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Independent)
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Could someone say a few words about the new SNA guidelines?
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
I will mention a few points on that. First, you can now only apply for a review of the SNA allocation between 15 September and 24 October. If a child with special educational needs joins a school during the year, you have to wait for that window to apply for a review, which on the ground means you have to remove support from another child in order to give the new child support, if their needs are greater.
The other thing that has been mentioned is behaviours of concern. That would include children who are aggressive in class and showing violent behaviours. In an SNA review, they are not considered children who most need the support of an SNA. Behaviours of concern are not included in complex needs. The reality is that in schools there are so many children who are only there because of the SNA who is sitting beside them, helping them to manage their behaviour and regulate themselves. What will happen is that the guidelines will lead, first, to fewer SNAs in schools and, second, it will lead to even more suspensions and expulsions from schools. That is where this will go.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Mr. Cronin and Deputy Healy. We now move to Independent Deputy Gillian Toole. She has seven minutes.
Gillian Toole (Meath East, Independent)
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I welcome all of our guests this morning. They probably had an early start coming from Limerick. I thank the Cathaoirleach for flagging Corpus Christi in Moyross.
I have received so much information that I have very few questions. I have a friend who works with the Early Focus group, Una Curran, who has given me a lot of background information over the years in general terms. I am based in County Meath. I say that to try to mirror what has been said.
Based on the information and answers given already, I will poke the bear a little bit. Where specifically within the Department and the NCSE do the obstacles exist? Do the witnesses collaborate with neighbouring schools? The collaboration with colleges of further education and training and UL is obviously beneficial. Is that something the witnesses would like to see mainstreamed so that students would have placements within schools?
Where would the witnesses start with assistive technology for schools that are on the journey trying to help themselves in advance of any departmental assistance? What would a simple template for a starting point for schools look like? I do not want to cover questions colleagues may ask.
In terms of the family support piece, how important are the counselling and advocacy supports that some can provide, and others cannot? Some schools might not even be aware of the opportunities that exist.
If there was not philanthropic support in Limerick in particular, what would be the overall cost? How would it be prioritised if, God forbid, the philanthropic supports were to disappear? What would the impact be?
Dr. Lindsey Liston:
In terms of cost, if we look at The Sky is the Limit programme, which provides the family support services the Deputy refers to – the wraparound services in child counselling, parent counselling, parent support, housing support, social welfare support and so on – at the moment the cost is €250,000 a year because it is run with an awful lot of goodwill. There is a double benefit. We have the third level institutions and the Government which needs a required number of clinicians every year, so that makes sense. That cost is not really there. We got an awful lot of goodwill from our assistant psychologist, who has recently retired, who gave the time for free. Excluding that free time, the cost of this model is about €250,000 a year. It is not going to break anybody's bank but if philanthropic funding were not there, quite frankly we could not provide these supports. They would cease to exist in the schools. What would happen is that we would go back to that situation where an inordinate number of children with additional needs would be suspended and expelled from school, and be rerouted to other schools because we would not have the resources to meet the children's needs. That is the benefit of having the services embedded within the school, both for parents and young people. If those services were gone tomorrow then, quite frankly, we would continue to hear the narrative of parents saying they have school places but, unfortunately, the schools do not have the resources to meet the children's needs.
Special classrooms are wonderful. They are great. They must be welcomed. The Government is doing a very good job in pushing those classrooms, but there is a cap on the number of children who can benefit from them. That is about five to six per year in the junior cycle when they come in, and they can stay for the entirety of their primary school education. The number of children who benefit from that is limited. When we have wraparound supports that are available in the school, it means that those intervention supports are available for those children and we do not have to pick up the phone and say: "Come at 11 o'clock and take your child home because we no longer have somebody here to provide supports for children." The cost is not huge but the outcomes are immeasurable from the perspective of the child and the family.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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Does anyone else want to come in?
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
We hear a lot about the co-ordination of services but, in our experience, it is very much person-dependent. There is no framework underpinning it. In my experience, there is no meaningful co-ordination in the delivery of services on the ground. We have seen over the years where we have had exceptional HSE staff who go the extra mile, come into the school, engage with the school and with staff and organise and liaise with parents in the school because parents are comfortable in the school, but that person may then move on and we get back to a very narrow, rigid framework. Flexibility to engage with schools works. We see that daily.
I have been working in Moyross for 25 years and I have seen the journey the community has been on. If we go back to the noughties, it was quite infamous in terms of the societal ills that pervaded in modern day Ireland. We were at a point even then where we had children coming to school on a daily basis who were expected to park their psychological baggage at the gate and come in and engage with a curriculum. We wonder then why tables are turned upside down and there is huge rage and emotion and obviously then there are suspensions and expulsions. That was just symptomatic of what was happening in the community, which was imploding and these children’s lives were imploding. We were left with a decision: do we just do the same old same old of rolling suspensions or do we try to meaningfully engage?
That is when we went about trying to source philanthropic supports to enable us to engage with the children in a therapeutic way, and it has been transformative. By no means are we saying the school is perfect but I have seen the journey it has been on and it is because of the multidisciplinary supports and philanthropic support.
I am deeply frustrated that this is not provided as par for the course but is, rather, the exception and not the norm. The children deserve this and it is required. Going back to the old adage about being penny wise and pound foolish, if we invest in young children, we will reap the rewards. Looking at the issues with residential services for children with additional needs and the care system, we see what it costs on a weekly basis to keep a child in care. I know the cost because we deal with this on a daily basis. It costs €5,000 to €6,000 a week to keep a child in residential care. It would be much better if the interventions could be put in place when these children are young and if we worked with the families.
We have done that a lot in our school. We have more than 50 people - parents and grandparents - engaged in counselling programmes every week to support the parents of our children. Much of that support is coming about through voluntary efforts but we are very fortunate to have a clinical psychologist, Dr. Declan Aherne, who works pro bonoin the school and provides clinical oversight to the programme. We have counsellors who provide voluntary supports to parents. That work with the families is necessary. It takes a whole village to raise a child. That is really important and we have seen the benefits that are reaped from that multi-agency, wraparound model. It has led to huge improvements and gains in our school.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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Deputy Toole asked about assistive technology. Will one of the witnesses address that?
Ms Derval McDonagh:
The Deputy asked where we would start with the technology. Every child has a right to reasonable accommodations to access the curriculum and access a high-quality education experience. Assistive technology is one part of how a child can do that. That joined-up aspect across health, social care and education is not yet system-wide. We are seeing major gaps for children in terms of their right to access the technology and access education. If children are on a waiting list to see a speech and language therapist for an alternative or augmentative communication device that they need to access their right to education, that leads to years lost for those children. Again, it is back to the question of whether this is a cost or an investment in our children in the early years. We really need to see the narrative around that changing.
I was really struck by the training aspect. Sometimes, when we are talking about training for schools, teachers or the school system, we take a narrow view of what that is. We congratulate ourselves if there is one closure day for a once-off training course. The school representatives sitting beside us talked about a deep transformational change, and that comes from working alongside one other in schools, having the input of therapists in the school system working alongside teachers, both of whom have two different skill sets that complement each other. Over time, that leads to transformational change as opposed to just having once-off training. In that, we see all sorts of creativity and innovation around accessing alternative and augmentative communication devices, and assistive technology in general, because that skill set is being built into the school community and people are getting what they need earlier, rather than sitting on a waiting list until they see a therapist.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Ms McDonagh.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the witnesses and their colleagues in the Public Gallery. I thank them for taking time out of their obviously very busy lives to come here this morning. They all stated their cases very well. I will ask each group a question and I might get to come back in again for a second round.
My first question is for the representatives of Corpus Christi school, who stated that the process for applying for resources could work better. I always take note of what people who are dealing with something say about how it can work better. In an ideal world, how would that process work for their school?
Dr. Lindsey Liston:
Part of the problem is we have to go to several different State agencies to get money in addition to the philanthropic and fundraising supports. That is because wraparound and therapeutic services embedded within schools are seen as a nice add-on; they are not seen as a natural evolution that allows inclusive education to actually happen. If that money came from the Department of education and was seen as the natural evolution of enabling education, rather than a fancy add-on that some schools could do with and others could do without, that would be far more effective than having us go to five, six or seven different Departments waiting for different funding calls to come through. Many of those calls are seed money for pilot projects. There are really effective pilots that produce really good outcomes, which are evaluated, but that was money left over at the end of a financial year and we do not really have that anymore.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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It is not standard funding.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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It would be known that the money was coming.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
The point is well made. We are still stuck in our silos. We have seen examples of where when pieces of work are jointly commissioned, the impact is huge. A concrete example of that in our school is when we worked with the HSE to evidence the therapeutic work being done in the school. We secured funding for an assistant psychologist for the school, the impact of which is that we now have more than 400 children engaged in well-being and mindfulness programmes on a weekly basis. The social return on the investment is huge. That work was jointly commissioned by the school and the HSE and now we have a clinical psychologist providing the clinical oversight. There are so many ways we could tease that out further and provide the supports that are required in schools.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I thank Dr. Liston and Mr. O'Neill. My next question is for the witnesses from St. James's school. For every child transitioning to secondary school, it is a big deal for them and their parents. I thought the new deadline of 1 October was great until the witnesses pointed out that it may not be as good as I thought it would be. From their lived experience, what would they do?
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
My colleague Sinead Fowler, who is in the Gallery, and I sat with a parent and went through the process. We tried it for ourselves because the parent in question did not have an email address or a computer. We would support a person like that anyway. It took us just over an hour to do the whole process, and that was without an updated report for the child. We hope the notification will be accepted and we can try to apply later on for the updated assessment for the child.
The waiting list for an assessment of need in our area is up to four years at the moment. This means that, technically, a child in second class in our school will have to apply now for an updated report for secondary school. That is madness. The answer is right in front of us in that the child is already in a special class.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
Yes, it is a case of let us carry on. It was a great idea to bring the deadline forward. It needed to be done because, as I said, we have so many children who, at the end of sixth class, still do not know where they are going. That is terrible for a child, especially a child with autism who likes to know what is coming next and the order and logic of things.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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Their parents need to know as well.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Cronin.
Moving to the witnesses from Inclusion Ireland, I really like the observation that a reformed system means belonging; not special but the same. The next few lines of their opening statement also really resonated with me. Do they think there should be no special classes and that children with additional needs should all be in mainstream classes? I want to understand their thinking.
Ms Lucinda Murrihy:
It is really important to design schools for all children and that must include inclusive spaces. We can sometimes be very two-dimensional in our thinking. Ultimately, we need to listen to children, consider their needs and what will support them and then design schools that way.
We will find the answer is probably not what we already have packaged together. It is really important to be creative. Even from a personal perspective, my two children get in a taxi every morning, leave their community and pass the school, 70 m away, to access what is appropriate education. Appropriate education should be every school. That is about looking at our mindset as a nation. When it comes to inclusive education and tackling that mindset, we are still stuck in an othering and dehumanising kind of mindset. Every child should be able to access his or her local school. One thing makes me sad about my children getting in taxis and leaving the community. My son is non-speaking. That is a language many of us do not yet know, but he is the key to teaching us about that when he is in his community. It is a huge loss when he is leaving the community every day and I watch hundreds of children pass by our house. It is so important that we work to make every school inclusive and accessible to all children. It is not about special or appropriate spaces, but about really looking inside our schools as the hearts and souls and funding true inclusion and staying away from funding othering and special.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Cuirim fáilte roimh na finnéithe go léir. Mr. O'Neill spoke about a general level of supports. He is obviously operating in an area of high deprivation. We know the particular issues that can be caused where poverty meets drugs and multigenerational trauma. There are particular periods and times. We have all seen the child protection issues in recent times whether we are talking about Kyran Durnin or Daniel Aruebose. We know the State needs to find a better way of meeting with families, screening, intervening and then applying those supports. The easiest thing in the world is to put the supports in a school-type setting. We then move to disabilities. We come into these rooms and are all in agreement about in-school therapies. The need is in the school. That is where the children are. It is sorted out from a logistics point of view so we will do that. At this stage we are talking about a pilot scheme with regard to special schools. It is 45 schools, which is significant, but they are only recruiting for this year at the moment. That is what the Minister of State, Deputy Michael Moynihan, told us in this committee last week. We are still not serious. It is what Ms McDonagh said about having the real conversation about what this should look like and then doing it. I could go through the CDNT timelines. There were 445.3 positions unfilled at the most recent count. There were 10,714 on the waiting list at the end of July for first contact. Almost 7,000 of those have been waiting over a year. The AON list is 16,593 by the end of the year. That is 23,903 overdue, and which are not being delivered within six months. It makes absolute sense with regard to what the witnesses are doing. They are talking about drawing down money from regeneration. They are talking about robbing Peter to pay Paul. They will take it from everywhere. They have already gone through the cost with regard to it. On some level they have given the answer. The fact is that this is the way to do it. It is just a case of us doing this across the board. It also takes the pressure off the CDNTs, which might be able to deal with more acute cases that cannot necessarily be delivered within a school setting.
I turn to the behavioural issues, which brings back memories of our Turlough and what I would have called "moments". I do not think my wife particularly appreciated when I called them that. You are talking about frustration. At that stage his communication was not that good, and he could sink the teeth into you. Schools have always been brilliant, but they had to learn, and we had to learn. All parents ever want is strategies for this, as opposed to being ping-ponged between CAMHS, the CDNT and whoever else. I know the witnesses are all talking about protocols but none of this has moved on. On some level I am working on the basis that they have already provided answers. Do they wish to give commentary on what I have said? On some level I am fed up having this conversation. That is the big problem. It is just a matter of delivering.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I should say that Turlough does not have them at the moment.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
We advised her to go to the GP to get a referral to CAMHS. Referral was made to CAMHS, and she received a letter to say that the child would not be suitable for help from the CAMHS service and to refer back to the psychologist working with him in the CDNT, who no longer works there. It is terrible. They are standing in front of us, crying, and asking for help and we are saying that we do not know. It is so hard for parents to work in systems like that. As the Deputy said, they are ping-ponged back and forth. I am just able to say I do not know because it is so hard-----
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I know every child is different. However, no different than a lot of the service Mr. Cronin is providing this is something that could, in a lot of cases, be dealt with in a school setting.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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We could be talking about a psychologist, about dealing with parents, teachers or SNAs and then everyone gets best practice. That can be doubled up with assistive technology for reinforcement.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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In the long run this is all cheaper.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Is it also what the IASLT and the other organisations say? No-one has had a proper conversation with them on the best means of doing everything from assessments through to therapies. They still keep operating on a system that we set up, and which is creaking.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I would like that noted on the record.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
We are blessed in Limerick city that we have phenomenal practitioners working in the CDNTs, but they are drowning. The south city children's disability network team is in one of the most disadvantaged areas of the country. That was configured in about 2021. It would initially have had a caseload of 120 children. It now has almost 600 children. As of the summer just gone, its staffing in that time period increased by 0.4 of a WTE. You have one speech therapist trying to work with 400 children with additional needs in one of the most disadvantaged communities in the country.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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It makes sense. It is a lot easier to do, and yet we continue. We talk about in-school therapies, but it is general talk.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
We see how it works, particularly for children who get overwhelmed in clinical settings. When they are comfortable in their own settings, the outcomes for the child and for the practitioner who sees the gains the child is making are perfection at times. The therapist, the child, the parent and the teacher are all working in tandem to maximise life outcomes for the child. The regeneration programme in Limerick was also mentioned. There is an ongoing regeneration programme in Limerick as I alluded to already. Seven of the ten most disadvantaged electoral districts are in Limerick. You obviously have a lot of children with additional needs within those contexts. As part of the regeneration programme, €4 million per year went into social interventions. You see the tide turning and things moving in the right direction. I gave the example of the HAPPEE initiative where you have the trainee OTs and SLTs coming into schools under clinical supervision. Just when that tide is starting to turn the money is starting to disappear, so we are going back. Rather than looking to build communities, regeneration becomes all about building houses again. You take away the social element, which is the most important part of any regeneration programme. That social intervention fund is critical. It is a unique urban regeneration fund that enables us to jointly commission pieces of work with Departments using the funding as a lever to extract other funding.
For example, the funding we secured for the HAPPEE initiative, with the multidisciplinary support coming into the school, enabled us to access funding from other Government Departments. All of a sudden, when you see the work happening, it is deeply frustrating to see the funding suddenly just ebb away. It makes no sense whatsoever. In ten years' time, when potentially some of these communities implode and the children continue to struggle and suffer, it will be said that we need another regeneration programme and we will start pumping the money in again. There is just such myopic, short-term thinking.
Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)
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I thank all of the witnesses for being here. Their statements are really instructive and enlightening for us. They are very powerful and moving as well. Mr. O'Neill summed up so much about where we are at in respect of inclusive education when he said in his statement, "No child's ... education should depend on charity or chance". I really salute his hard-hitting commentary about the degree to which schools have to make extraordinary, almost heroic, efforts to meet the basic needs of children. Also, there was his emphasis on relationships being at the core of supporting those children as well as the social and psychological complexity that can exist beyond diagnosis. Will he say more about the gap that exists between the resources he was granted by the Government and what his school requires to function comfortably? Has that discrepancy improved or worsened over time? Will he give some detail on how close to the wire he is with having programmes in place or enough resources each year? Also, will he say a little about the prospects his pupils with additional needs are facing in respect of second level education in Limerick? Do they have very limited options? Will they potentially have to travel for long distances? Is there much of a difference between primary and secondary provision for children with additional needs in Moyross?
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
Going back to the resourcing question, Mr. Cronin has alluded to this in a number of the points he made. It is a constant struggle because the reality is that it is an extraordinary context that requires an extraordinary response. Again, rather than looking at the costs, as has been said by previous contributors, it is an investment in young people. From our perspective, and Dr. Liston mentioned it already, we have to fundraise about €250,000 per year to enable us to roll out the programmes but that enables us to provide more than 100 children per week with individual therapeutic supports that make a huge difference to the children's long-term educational outcomes and life outcomes. In my opinion, it is a very small investment.
We are constantly looking at how we can co-ordinate and align our services better. For example, we have a local Garda youth diversion project funded through the Department of justice. It runs an equine programme. We have a number of children with additional needs, children with cerebral palsy and children with Down's syndrome who engage with that horseriding programme every Friday. Again, that is based on relationships with our local Garda youth diversion project. There is no statutory framework or interdepartmental policy that enables us to do that. Again, it comes back to the point around relationships.
I mentioned this previously, and will probably be shot for saying this, but I do not see the problem as being money. I see it as being how we align our resources and how we co-ordinate the funding because it is all so siloed. There is a pocket of funding with Tusla and with the HSE and there is justice funding and education funding. There are significant sums of money still within the economy and the Exchequer. Again, it comes back to how we co-ordinate it. On the ground, we see in some of our communities that when it is done well, it can make a huge difference in the lives of so many children. We hear so much about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children, that children need to be protected, nurtured and empowered. That is a distant reality when we see the lives so many children in this country are now leading.
Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)
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It sounds like it is all so disjointed, that you have to be social entrepreneurs and project managers as well as teachers and principals at the same time.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
I am very fortunate with the deputy principal in our school and a number of our staff who are literally, daily trawling websites looking for funding applications or are spending hours afterschool completing funding applications at home. They are going to meet individuals, no more than Mr. Cronin is I would say, pitching. Children's futures are depending on our pitching. That is not what this should be about. Our country should be in a position now where we are ensuring these children get the education and opportunities they deserve and require.
Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)
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It is very difficult to have peace of mind every year, because while it sounds like Mr. O'Neill has been very successful in that there is necessarily uncertainty as to whether he will achieve that next year or the year after.
Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)
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I thank Mr. O'Neill. Ms Murrihy spoke very poignantly about the impact of the school placement crisis and its impact on families. The statistics she outlined on the distances families are forced to travel to school are very stark. There is the dislocation from communities, restricted practices, and the impact on attainment and general well-being among children with additional needs. I thank her for sharing her own experience as well. I worked in the mental health services in Cork previously and that experience gave me some insight over the years into the neglect by the State of adults with intellectual disabilities who sometimes end up in psychiatric settings where their mental health often deteriorates further. Many of those people were living with ageing parents who were unable to cope or maybe living alone in precarious circumstances in the community, at risk of exploitation. This is a very big question and might be more of a sociological or political one, but does Ms Murrihy, Ms McDonagh or anyone else on the panel have any thoughts on how we have gotten to such a drastic state of affairs in this country when it comes to upholding the rights of people with disabilities?
Ms Lucinda Murrihy:
It comes back to our mindset, to be honest. I know that is very broad and it is difficult to get one's head around how exactly we would unpick that. We are talking about the children within our community. We are talking about children with an intellectual disability. They are so valuable to what we are talking about today. They are the teachers. We need to see them as teachers and experts in their difference and disability, which is varied. We have a huge variety of difference and disability in Ireland but also humans are not static. We do not stay with high-support needs or low-support needs. We change every day, all of us. We really need to look at that. I think it is bigger than education. It is about really acknowledging that, and a lot of it comes from the fact none of us went to school with difference or disability. I know I am repeating myself but the key is to ensure we have inclusion and integration, that children are not leaving communities and that we are not investing in othering. I do not think we necessarily need to invest more in education. We need to look at how we are investing and look at our goals and make sure they are aligned to the UNCRPD. If we start there, acknowledging that maybe our mindsets are not in the right place, and start from a rights based lens and a child centered, child focused place, we will get it right. That is the path forward.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Ms Murrihy and Deputy Quaide. There was one question that was not answered and the lads from Moyross can probably answer that if they want to. The question the Deputy had was about transitioning from primary to secondary school in Limerick. As the witnesses know, we have a common application programme, which is run in Limerick.
Dr. Lindsey Liston:
We do, Chair. What we forget with the common application system is that it is a system that arose from systematic discrimination. Sometimes it is lauded as this positive thing, that we have a common application system. The idea is that every child will apply to their nine or ten schools and at the end of that application system, everybody will get a place but that does not happen. We had to put the system in place because it was not happening. However, the system that was put in place has not actually produced that either.
In terms of the transition, the wheels tend to fall off when children leave primary school and I would imagine it is the same whether it is in Limerick, Dublin, Kerry, Cork or Kildare. We have a huge emphasis on early intervention, and rightfully so, but those supports are not following on. It is like what was said that one needs an additional report to make sure the disability is still there and has not disappeared to someplace. What if one cannot get that report before going into secondary school? Oftentimes we see children get school places and there is no controversy or noise in the media and things go a little bit quiet. What happens is when the children are brought into that mainstream secondary school, they are re-routed out or are encouraged to go to the school down the road, the DEIS school or to the special school.
You have all of these types of things coming on. We are concealing the fact, because we are saying everybody had a place, but they are getting their place without any intention. That is the mindset of keeping them there, because the supports are not following the children.
We have adopted a policy in this country of concentrating supports in specific schools. What we are telling particular children in families who have additional needs is that if you want these supports, you have to go to that school because they are not going to come to them. What happens then is, when we talk about inclusion, we end up with this high concentration and clustering of children who all have the same needs or come from the same places because they have to go there to get the supports. We could not possibly have the supports following the children because administratively this is easy. Then we have situations where schools are looking at one down the road and saying it has class sizes of 17, but 15 of the 17 children have really high and complex needs. You may as well have 45 children in those classes. There are a couple of issues with the policies.
Even terms of the previous question as to how have we got here, which is a big question, it is a mindset. The institutionalisation of people, the hiding away of people and our history in Ireland of doing that, of turning away, turning a blind eye, pretending something does not exist, and thinking to hide it behind railings and let them deal with it, is holding us back. Behind, people are saying it does not work and we cannot put them all in together. In people's minds, we have a fallback on that type of model. We need to resist that strongly.
Maria Byrne (Fine Gael)
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My apologies. I was not here for the opening statements, but I have read them. I am on the health committee at the same time and I was in there first. I apologise if the questions have been asked already. I will ask two or three questions, to start with.
On waiting lists for assessments of need, is it a big issue and how can it be addressed? The barriers to the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream schools is another issue. I would be aware of the Sky is the Limit programme in Moyross. I compliment Mr. O'Neill and Dr. Liston in relation to it, and especially the staff in the school. Is it something that should be replicated in other schools and could it be replicated? If it were, would there be barriers to it being replicated? Would it be cost prohibitive or whatever? I am aware of the impact it has had on the school, the students and the area. That is why I am asking that question.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
From a cost perspective, the social return on the investment that you are making is absolutely huge. For what I would consider a relatively small investment, if you were to equate it with what it costs to keep a child in residential care or State care, it is a drop in the ocean. The Sky is the Limit is the tag line we use, but ultimately it is about multi-agency work on the ground, joining up the dots and co-ordinating services. It is something we are very good at talking about but we are not that good at doing on the ground.
We are fortunate within our community that there are a lot of agencies that have bought into that multi-agency approach. I used the example a while ago of riding for the disabled where the local Garda diversion project is supporting us with that. Its members are working with some other members of vulnerable families but they are able to work with some of the children on a Friday, and these children are getting an opportunity to head out every Friday morning. It is one example of how you can join up the dots.
For me, permanent school-based multidisciplinary teams are the only way to go, and not as short-term pilot schemes. We know what works. We see the difference. I come back to that social return on the investment that we are making. It is absolutely huge. It is the bare minimum these children deserve and require. The Senator herself mentioned it. When you look at the waiting lists for AONs, they will hit close to 25,000. When you look at how children have been bounced between primary care teams, CDNTs and CAMHS, with them floundering, for example, in areas of Limerick, and waiting three years now for an autism assessment and two years for an initial appointment, we have to do better than that. I firmly believe that having school-based multidisciplinary teams, collapsing the silos and enabling Departments to have collapsible funding streams where you can jointly commission pieces of work between health, education, justice, Tusla or whatever, is where we can make the real gains. I see the benefits of that daily through the work that we are doing and I would love to see more of that happening in schools all over the country.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
With regards to the waiting lists, in my opening statement I referred to the home-school liaison programme in our school. Sinéad Fowler, who joins us here today, spends so much of her time sitting with parents and filling out paperwork, applying for assessments and different services. As is the nature of working in a DEIS school, children come from very troubled homes. There is lots of trauma, there is lots of chaos and different things like that, and they miss their appointments then. Once they have missed a certain amount of appointments, they are discharged from the service for not showing up. It would be amazing, and a simple money saver, to see someone who works for these teams who goes out into the community and knocks on doors, as the home-school liaison does in schools, and literally supports the parents by physically bringing them to appointments because it is so easy for us as a school to flag these families. It is a simple point.
The other thing we have seen in school as well is children who may apply for an assessment of need or to a primary care psychologist or something like that, the waiting game of two or three years start, but then, in the middle of that, they move address. There is one child in our school who was living in Dublin 8, right beside our school. He moved across the Liffey to Dublin 7 and it took seven years for him to be seen by a speech and language therapist. The main reason there was because he moved postcodes.
Ms Lucinda Murrihy:
The Senator asked about the barriers to inclusion in mainstream. There are lots of schools - a couple here today - that are making enormous efforts to be inclusive but we hear from families whose children experience exclusion or are not necessarily understood at school when they are trying to communicate through behaviour and are facing unfair barriers such as not receiving their right to reasonable accommodations.
One of the things we in Inclusion Ireland are really concerned about is that the voices of these children are not heard and one of the main reasons for this is because of the way we have the schools complaints process set up at the moment. We are encouraging children and families to complain only to schools and those messages are not getting beyond some schools. The process is quite biased and it is also putting families through a system and quite a long process. Many families are traumatised with the experiences of their children. We are talking about children who are so anxious they cannot access school. They are experiencing school avoidance and they do not feel safe in the school environment. Because of the way we have the schools complaints process set up at the moment, those voices are not getting heard beyond schools, and unless families go through that entirely long drawn-out process and that is completed, they cannot complain to the Ombudsman for Children. That system is set-up to silence children and we really need to look at that.
Ms Derval McDonagh:
Could I add one or two points? The inspectorate has done some really interesting work over the past couple of years and published reports to tie in here as well. Its recent report in 2025 on admission policies found that there were concerns about it that almost all the policies had criteria which could exclude children who had more significant support needs. That is a definite barrier as well in terms of access to schools.
The inspectorate has also done some interesting thematic reports on what inclusive education should or could look like. It is interesting the language it is using. That is language that we reflect in Inclusion Ireland as well. Inclusion is an ongoing process. It is about offering the highest quality education for all while respecting diversity. It is about opening our school doors to all children, welcoming all children through the school doors, but also respecting that children are unique and have diversity.
We need to set up our schools to reflect that as well. Some interesting work on those barriers has been published, which that we are reflecting on at the moment.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for attending. I know being principals and parents the witnesses are probably already overwhelmed, but they are here this morning advocating. It is so often the case that the people who are most overwhelmed are the ones who are battling the most.
I spoke to the Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, last week about something similar to what Dr. Liston said, which is that we are in single digits for the number of children who do not have school places on paper, but in reality there might be a school place but if the services and supports are not there, the student might have to go home to get changed or because they cannot manage a full school day. That ties in with what Mr. O'Neill said regarding the lived experience not being inclusive education. He said what we are saying is that on paper this is an inclusive school or inclusive education, but this is not the reality. I have worked in the area as a behaviour support specialist for 20 years, so I often think about it.
If we take PE, art and lunch as simple places to start inclusion, we often say if the children cannot line up, cannot sit still, cannot follow the direction, or if it is a hopping exercise, they cannot hop and then they cannot take part in PE. Yet, simply being in the room with the other kids their age who are doing PE while they are doing something totally different is a version of inclusion. This is also the case in a lunch environment where a person needs help to feed themselves, but they are not being separated and having lunch in the classroom in the autism section of the school. In many schools, we have an autism class attached to a mainstream school and we call it inclusion, but actually it is not as woven through as we would like.
Most of the witnesses have spoken about the wraparound services. I would love to hear examples, especially from Corpus Christi, around what those wraparound services look like. When we had the Minister of State before the committee last week, and speaking to the Minister, Deputy McEntee, the time is now for us to inform what this new national therapy service is going to look like. We are saying we are getting therapists into schools, but they have been in schools over the years. It is about getting them back in. I was talking to the Minister of State about what is this going to look like. I had questions regarding whether it it will be one-to-one therapy outside of the classroom, whether it will be in the classroom, whether it will go to bus escorts, or whether we are going to consult on circle time because that is where the need is. What does that look like from a practical perspective in the witnesses' schools at the moment when they are doing that wraparound service? Mr. O'Neill referenced that therapy is woven into the rhythm of the school day. This is going to go into a report. What does that look like because it sounds like its best practice?
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
The Deputy's observations are interesting. She mentioned how the autism class is over there at that side of the school, but we hear so much about the autism unit. People still talk about autism units saying, "They are over there in the unit." It is a classroom. These children are part of the schools. Language is really important. Coming back to the Deputy's question about how it woven into the day, Mr. Cronin made an important point about the home school liaison scheme. Mr. Cronin and I were both home school liaison co-ordinators. That is the most important job in the school. You are the connection between the home and school and the bridge between home life and school life.
I will provide a concrete example of how home school liaison can be woven into that therapeutic tapestry during the school day. We are lucky with the HAPPEE initiative that I mentioned earlier where we have the support of St. Gabriel's children's disability network team with OTs and SLTs coming in and supervising the trainee SLTs and OTs coming from the school of allied health in the University of Limerick. For example, we might bring a parent in to sit down with the SLT or OT go through a home-based programme, but the home school liaison will also sit in on the meeting. The home school liaison can then support the parents by ensuring the implementation of the home-based programme, including whatever exercises and routines that are required. It is something very simple, but rather than going into a clinical setting where a parent may not turn up because they may be overwhelmed, or they may not ask the necessary questions because they are overwhelmed. They have their advocate and their support who is part of the school staff and is somebody who they have a relationship with and it works well.
On the in-school therapeutic work, there is the universal provision where some of the SLTs and OTs go in and do whole class programmes with the teacher present, so not alone are the children benefiting, but the teacher is also benefiting. It is building teacher capacity. There is the individual work being done as well under the supervision of trained SLTs and physiotherapists working with children on an individual basis and liaising. The St. Gabriel's staff are part of the local CDNT. It is almost like a virtual circle. They are liaising with their colleagues with regards to children with additional needs. They are linking in with primary care. They are liaising with the teachers and building capacity the whole time within the schools. There is a massive legacy left behind in terms of the work that is being done. Ultimately, what is most important is that the children are benefiting hugely from it as well.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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It sounds like perfect best practice and hopefully we can get that back to the Ministers on the pilot that is being rolled out.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
On the therapeutic supports, we sometimes forget the mental health supports. I am a huge advocate of play and music therapies and the impact that has in schools. I previously mentioned that for many years we were looking at children who were literally at times living in a community that was imploding. This was back in the noughties. They were expected to come to school and engage with a curriculum having seen the most horrific atrocities the evening before. They were expected to leave their psychological baggage at the gate and to come in to engage with curriculum. It just does not work. We see the impact of having that therapeutic support woven into the school day and how it enables children to regulate emotions and ultimately leads to better educational outcomes for children.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
In our school, when a school completion officer knocks on the door and after what a child has seen that morning, we can see a child sigh and think, "Oh thank God, they are here." That is how important it is to these children. They get out and get to do their little bit of therapy. It is incredibly important.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I can think of a one little man who I worked with who would go home to his and would say to her, "I need to be able to bring my football to school because if I can bring my football to school, I will be able to make friends." As a great mother, she went into the school to ask why he cannot bring a football. The schools said they only use their footballs. I responded: "Hold on a second, what is the story with this football?" There were different pods because of Covid. There was a line in the school and students were not allowed to go over to the other pods. When the fifth class and sixth class students kicked over the ball by mistake, he would get the ball, throw it back to them and get great attention. In his mind if he could get a football, he would have friends, but with his SNA and teachers having their lunch break there was not support at lunchtime to help him make friends. He would be getting suspended because he was breaking the rules and being too rough to try get the ball to get the friends. If we could weave that piece throughout, we would have the right support.
Micheál Carrigy (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the witnesses. Before I start, I am a parent of a young autistic boy. I have the knowledge as a parent and a politician in meeting families on a regular basis. I chaired the Joint Committee on Autism. I currently chair the all-party committee. We have a parliamentary group with over 40 members who continue to meet monthly to advocate and push to make sure we continue to work with organisations. We have met Ms McDonagh on numerous occasions. We want to continue to advocate and support. There is a strong support group here with all the members on this committee. However, we have a long way to go.
We published an autism innovation strategy in August 2024 on the back of the joint committee report. We put a commitment in the programme for Government to legislate for it. I spent two years drafting legislation. We brought it into the Seanad. We put it in the programme for Government and it is not on the legislative programme that was issued last week. To say I am disappointed is an understatement, but that needs to change if we want to show people that we are serious about making changes. That is what needs to happen.
Deputy Keogh mentioned the sensory supports. I am a firm believer in them. I mentioned it to the Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan. I worked with speech and language therapists from County Galway, and one based in London with the NHS. We did a trial project of sensory supports and a support app for teachers, SNAs and things they can do in the classroom with a number of national schools. I have seen the benefits of music therapy for my young lad. He went from a young lad we could not comprehend and understand, but three months later he was able to speak.
The meltdowns stopped and he was able to start in mainstream. He is currently in a special class. It is a class and not a unit, as was said, in our local national school. He is thriving. He will be the best that he can be and it is my job to make sure I continue to work towards that.
An SNA review was published in the past number of days. I am sure it has probably been brought up already; my apologies, I just missed out a bit. Significant concerns have been expressed to me in relation to that. This may be a good opportunity for the witnesses, as they have gone through it, to maybe put on the record what their concerns are.
Inclusion Ireland fed into and did a massive amount of work on the Grace report. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, announced a new commission, which is due to begin in early 2026. What are the witnesses' comments on that? How would they like to see that commission work? What are their views on how that commission should be shaped to get the answers we need?
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
I am delighted to hear the Deputy's son is thriving. That is great. That is what we want in our school, when we look at the children who are in our autism class. I am delighted that is happening for the Deputy.
On the SNA allocations and the review that was published, the Deputy mentioned how important the sensory support children get is. That does not really fall under the job of an SNA in this. It goes back to looking at complex needs and the SNAs are there to support children with complex needs. Things such as movement breaks and sensory supports do not fall under that category. I will not take up too much time on this because other people will want to say something, but in our school, children come from such tough backgrounds and such difficult homes. When they walk through the school gates, one of the first things they see is a line of SNAs, as well as some teachers, who stand out to greet them with "Good morning". A value is put on that. It might be the first smiling face they see looking at and greeting them that morning. It might just set them up for a good day. This SNA allocation and the review just seem to blow all that kind of stuff out of the water.
Micheál Carrigy (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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What consultation took place with the organisations representing SNAs and the schools, to Mr. Cronin's knowledge?
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
What is really concerning, and Mr. Cronin spoke about this, is that only a six-week window for application is being allowed each year. Children's lives do not fit into a six-week window. We have a similar context. We could have children coming to us in the middle of the year from a homeless shelter for a mid-year enrolment. There are changes in circumstances. Sadly, children are living with parents who are struggling with the pain of addiction. Things can change very quickly. It does not operate in this narrow little six-week window. It is another example of where we are more focused on gatekeeping and rationing rather than enabling children to get access to the supports they require.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
Another thing is that, from reading this, it feels as though if you do a review, you could lose your SNAs. You may be using SNAs for sensory support, or for things like that in the morning. There are children who come to us from homeless hostels and do not get breakfast. It may be an SNA spends 15 minutes in the morning doing that with them. We are almost afraid to ask for a review now because all that will go.
Micheál Carrigy (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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I am just conscious of time. Sorry.
Ms Derval McDonagh:
I will come in on the SNA piece because that is important. It is our understanding, from speaking to SNAs, that their actual roles have not changed as a result of this process. It is important to say that. Of course, we recognise that short window will be a massive challenge for schools but, importantly, when this has been out into the world, the reaction tells us something. One is that all State agencies, including the NCSE and the Department of education, need to communicate to children and families really clearly about the repercussions of any process. What is out there now is some misinformation about the process. It is not all very clear for people. We need to take that seriously. Under public sector duty, all public and State bodies have a duty to communicate effectively with the people who are using the services or the people who are most affected, who are children and families. There is something there in how we communicate about this to make sure there is no misinformation. The reaction also tells us something about how vulnerable people feel in the system in terms of resources and being very concerned about resources potentially being taken away. Again, that comes down to how we communicate about this being critical.
I thank the Deputy for bringing up Grace and the work Inclusion Ireland has done in collaborating with a number of human rights experts across the country. We did that work and published the report recently on Grace because we want to learn lessons from what happened in the Farrelly commission. The best way to learn lessons is to take stock, look back and ask what did not work for Grace as a survivor of those incredibly traumatic decades of neglect and abuse. We now have a unique opportunity with the new commission on historical abuse in schools to do things right and make sure the voice of people who are non-speaking is front and centre in that commission. Unfortunately, and it is very sad and stark to say, one third of the allegations of abuse came from special schools. Therefore, one third of those allegations of abuse could come from people who are now adults and may now be non-speaking or need support to communicate. They have every right to access justice, just like any other citizen of this State. We need to really embed communication supports in that commission. We are willing to do the work and work behind the scenes to make sure that happens, including working alongside the Minister, Deputy McEntee, and the commission to make sure it is effective and people's voices are heard to learn the lessons from Grace.
Laura Harmon (Labour)
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I thank all of the witnesses. They have painted a really holistic picture of the experiences of children, students and parents in schools, and those working in the sector. I apologise that I was not here to listen to their opening statements but I have read them. I was attending a prior commitment in relation to workers' rights.
I will direct my first questions to Inclusion Ireland. As an observation from reading its statement, and having looked at its survey from 2024, it is heartbreaking to read some of the statistics. These are statistics but behind them a lot of pain, stress and anxiety for children and parents are being experienced. What is happening is deeply unfair and unjust. We talk about inclusion but it is very clear, in reality, that what is happening in many instances is the opposite of inclusion. It is exclusion. The statistics that 68% reported they struggle with school rules that were never designed for them, that 27% have experienced restraint and that many children feel going to school is like survival are deeply sad. It is deeply saddening to hear that, as it is to hear about the physical symptoms of anxiety that are caused, the emotional avoidance of school and the segregation, in many ways, as well.
How can we move away from disciplinary approaches to education to a more inclusive model of schooling? The figure for disabled children who are thriving in school is just 14%. How can we ensure they reach their full potential?
Ms Lucinda Murrihy:
I will start with the disciplinary piece. It is important there be a shift in mindset in seeing behaviours and communication. We talked about non-speaking children, for many of whom the mode of communication is behaviour. Transformational training is key here in looking at behaviour as a very valuable tool and a clue to something being wrong in the environment or something being off with the adults around the child. It is about looking to place the shift, change and adaptation on the adults and environment and not on the child. That is really important. Children pick up very quickly the feeling of not belonging or the feeling of being misjudged because of their behaviour.
This deeply impacts their mental health, so they grew up without confidence and the kind of foundational things we want children to have, such as self-belief. It is really important that we look at investing in transformational change in terms of training and educating all schools, along with all teachers and principals.
Ms Derval McDonagh:
There is a reason the UNCRPD talks about a progressive realisation of an inclusive model of education. It is recognised that this can take time and intention and needs to be done carefully over time. Inclusion Ireland has been long calling for a strategic plan that has cross-government support on inclusive education that is documented and written, where we can see year on year incrementally how we are making progress, and get away from this piloting system of doing a patch here and there and seeing how that is working, and looking at system-wide change. There have been some wholesale positives about this such as the advent of therapists going into schools and that coming out of a pilot project and into a more permanent structure. We need to see that built on year on year, however, and for children and families to trust that an inclusive model of education is being built, that needs to be documented so we know that this year there are going to be a specific number of additional therapists going in system-wide and a specific number the following year. That is going to take time and we recognise it cannot happen overnight.
Children and disabled adults who have come through the system need to have their voices heard in the co-design of that strategic plan. Again, as Ms Murrihy said, that transformational training needs to be embedded, building therapies year on year and building our spaces so that our schools are fit for purpose and have places for children to come and go from to have their sensory needs and accommodation rights met. Our policies and procedures absolutely need to be neuro-affirmative and children's rights based. We need to look at the whole suite of policies in this inclusive education and strategic plan, such as the code of behaviour and guidelines that will look at seclusion and restraint and make sure they are focused on children’s rights. We need also to invest in our school leaders and communities and give them the time and space to grow inclusive education schools. Step by step is what we need to see here and there are many people willing to put their shoulder to the wheel and have those conversations, including children and families, to build a better and more inclusive model of education over the next ten years.
Laura Harmon (Labour)
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There is some time left. In relation to the narrative around appropriate school places, and our witnesses already touched on this, how do we ensure mainstream schools are also inclusive?
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
I echo what the ladies said. Children need connection, predictability and trust. Our focus and view is sometimes too narrow. It is not only about children but also parents. Schools need to ensure they connect with parents and build the trust and relationships. Mr. Cronin spoke earlier about the home-school liaison scheme, particularly with the DEIS schools where you have that person on the ground building relationships and trust with the families. That should not be about one individual but a culture and philosophy that permeates throughout our education system. I have found that when you work with the family and build up that positive bank of goodwill, that is how you start to make gains and progress. That for me is what inclusive education is all about: taking that holistic wrap-around. I am not trying to be trite or sentimental about it; that is the reality. It actually makes me very pragmatic about it. It makes my job easier. If we build relationships with parents and families, it makes our jobs easier, children have better outcomes and everybody goes away at the end of the day much happier and far less frustrated.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
I will jump in on that. As school principals we need to move away from feeling that we are going to lose a resource. Everything comes down to losing a teacher. As an example, several children with significant needs have joined our school since September. They will need support throughout the year. However, we lost 20 children who were living in IPAS accommodation near the school. More than likely, even though we are getting more children with complex needs, we are going to lose a class teacher because our numbers have dropped below that golden number schools have to have on 30 September. It makes it very hard for schools when everything is about having to have things in order to have other resources. If we want to be inclusive we need to be able to be confident in what we have and not be afraid that if a child does not come in, we might lose a teacher or an SNA. We need to move away from that system.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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We move to Senator Devine of Sinn Féin,
Máire Devine (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Deputy Devine.
Máire Devine (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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It is okay, I forgive the Cathaoirleach. Céad míle fáilte to our witnesses. What came across today is the tender loving care that is being given to our most vulnerable kids. All kids deserve it but it is often lacking in what should be a secure place: a home. I need to announce my partisanship here, which is that I am on the board of St. James's Primary School, which was my old primary school back in the day under a different name. It certainly is a happy place and a challenging place. They went through an extremely tough time prior to the summer with an encampment outside the school for months prior to the summer, and it is an entrance for three schools. The tensions, aggressions and assaults were horrific and I thank Mr. Cronin in particular who managed that situation. He referenced that 40% of the students in the school are of different nationalities and they were going in and out of this encampment. It was extremely scary and aggressive. There was a lot of stuff going on and it was managed very well. These are the hidden things principals have to put up with. That is important. The school is one of the most vulnerable in the city. Apart from that it is a good story, we came through it and hopefully a lot has been repaired.
I do not know who is the right person to answer this, but Tusla’s report got the message out today about chronic school absences. They are at 22%. Though they have improved, they have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Is there any data, whether written research or otherwise, about whether those with additional vulnerabilities and extra needs who require extra care are more likely to miss school and be chronic absentees? If so, are there reasons for that?
We discussed SNAs. They sit there and hold on to the child, in particular children with violent, disruptive, challenging behaviours. They hold quieter children also. SNAs are very important, as are home liaison and home outreach representatives. Is there anything else that could be done and has been found to be positive in attracting children to the school? This applies especially to the vulnerable children who might not have the verbal skills of five- and six-year-olds who are demanding of their parents to go to school.
The children's ombudsman has come out strongly on protecting children's needs along with those of children with additional needs, highlighting the lack of school places and school transport issues. The whole system seems to have cracked in that we are constantly engaging with parents in trying to beg for places. How difficult must it be to say people are not on the list this time or this year when parents hear that year in, year out. How difficult that task must be. Once people get a place, there is the question of whether school transport or a bus is available to them. Since I returned to the school in August, that has been up there as an issue.
It is lovely to hear Inclusion Ireland representatives, but they are singing the language of the Government, which holds the purse strings, when they say it is not necessarily about extra funding but the allocation of funding and the flexibility of the autonomy of each school or groups of schools or part of the school with checks and balances and good governance.
That is something that would need to be highlighted in the report from this committee. It is not about asking for much extra but an adjustment and allowing the funding to be placed where it is needed, as opposed to the rigid system we have at the moment.
I again thank the witnesses. I am blow-in to this committee. It is not my committee. I had to come to the meeting to offer my support. St. James's Primary School rocks.
Mr. Ciarán Cronin:
I thank the Deputy for such nice and kind words out of the blue. I will touch on the issue of children who are not coming to school and absenteeism. As a home school liaison and a principal, I have learned that no parents want their children sitting at home and not coming to school. In every case we have of a child who has missed upwards of 60 or 70 days of school, there are many complex issues, all of which are playing out. The symptom of those issues is that the children are missing school. The problem is not missing school. It is a symptom of all the other problems. In our school, we have tried to look at school absenteeism as a symptom of another problem when we are dealing with parents. That has led to lots of referrals to different agencies and services. That is only possible with the amazing support of our Tusla EWO, Ms Marion Mannion, and the close relationship we have built over time. As Mr. O'Neill mentioned, it is all about these relationships which help you push your school forward. That is just something I wanted to mention. I do not know if Mr. O'Neill has similar experiences.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
What the Deputy has described sounds like the perfect post-Covid storm. She mentioned the child disability service, which is overwhelmed. Tusla is overwhelmed. The education and welfare service is completely overwhelmed. Coming back to Mr. Cronin's point, we talk a lot about the value of education but so many of the families we work with operate on a needs-basis, meaning the need to survive. There are days when families are overwhelmed, understandably. If you have four or five children, one of whom has additional needs, and are in a homeless hub or if you are struggling with the pain of addiction, school and the value of education are not priorities. On Mr. Cronin's point, it is about joining up the dots and ensuring we are getting in the appropriate services to support children so they can get to school.
In my experience, parents do not want their children at home. They want them in school. Children want to be in school, too. They want the connection, the love and the relationships. It is like the story of the little boy with the football. He just wanted to be in school and connected to somebody. Mr. Cronin made an important point in respect of the issue around attendance and services being overwhelmed. I am not talking about the punitive measures that education and welfare officers can put in place. I am talking about the preventative and supportive measures. That work is not happening at the moment because education and welfare officers are overwhelmed with school refusals and exclusions and reduced timetables. That preventative work is not happening. There is a massive amount of firefighting going on.
The situation is similar within Tusla. God knows where the threshold now is for intervention in the context of child protection services. Nobody seems to know. We can see the cases that are slipping through the cracks. Sadly, we have seen the result of that in recent weeks. We see that, as I am sure Mr. Cronin does, on a daily basis. It is frightening.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Is that in respect of physical violence?
Dr. Lindsey Liston:
I will come in on attendance, the data and whether there is a difference in respect of vulnerable children. The data we in Ireland collect makes a distinction between DEIS and non-DEIS. We know that DEIS schools have higher rates of absence, so we can deduce that there is a level of vulnerability there compared with non-DEIS schools. When we look internationally at the data, we can see the groups of children who are most at risk of exclusion from education, whether through expulsion or suspension or other forms of informal exclusion within that system because the system will not bend with the child but instead wants the child to fit into the system. Those most affected are children with disabilities, children of colour and children from poorer backgrounds. All the international data tells us those are the three cohorts of children who are particularly at risk of non-attendance. Different things affect their attendance. It is not always behavioural on the part of the child. There are issues within schools when resources are not there. Schools sometimes do things informally. The intention is not to harm but it comes back to not having those wraparound services available in school whereby a child can be taken out for ten minutes when there is a serious behavioural episode and for that child to be regulated and come back in. Such children could spend 20 minutes with a music therapist or an art therapist, but those supports may not be there. The tendency is to say that the problem is in the minds, bodies and communities of these children and their families rather than to say that our systems are not flexible enough.
Much of the literature tells us that we are not checking with children how they are experiencing types of interventions in school. Much of their behaviour is kicking back against that. It is kicking back against what they see as discrimination. They ask, "Why am I getting this?" We are not giving children the respect of explaining to them why we are doing certain things and what it is we are doing. We must understand the behaviour. That is one thing. We must also understand what it tells us, which is probably most important. Money is great, and we absolutely need it, but one of the most positive forms of intervention is relationships. That is what it comes down to. Children need to feel that their presence is welcome. Parents need to feel that their presence is welcome. They need to feel like they are not being pushed away or shushed away and told we do not have the resources, that there are 400 children in a school and that the parents are just going to have to take their children home. Relationships are key. It is not always easy to do when we have to meet regulatory compliance and all of that, but that is essentially what the data is telling us. There is a difference. Certain children are more at risk. In Ireland, we know that children who attend DEIS schools have higher rates of absence than those who attend non-DEIS schools. I apologise for the long answer but the data tell an important story about how education works for some.
Ms Derval McDonagh:
We must have an incredibly sensitive and nuanced conversation about school attendance. It clearly is an issue but we cannot pin it on the children and families, who desperately want their children to attend every day. The inspectorate report in 2024 stated that young people's attendance at school is linked directly to the extent to which they feel welcomed and included in the school community and the extent to which they find the classroom engaging, interesting and relevant. We must take that important data and consider what we can do differently to ensure children who desperately want to attend can do so and how to build resources into the system so that those children can turn up as their best selves.
Deputy Devine mentioned resources, and I appreciate that. As Ms Murrihy mentioned, sometimes it is not about more resources but is about different allocation. I would love the committee to consider the fact that the system we have developed now has not been made by design but has been made in a reactive way. It has mushroomed over time. We have developed a system of special schools, special classes and mainstream in a reactive way. We have never been led by the data. When I talk about data, it is about the direct lived experience of children and their families in the school system. We have no disaggregated data on the experience of disabled children in school and educational outcomes, despite the fact that one third of the budget is going into the education of disabled children. We have no disaggregated data. That is something we need to take seriously and take stock of. We can shape what the system should or could look like on the basis of the data coming from children and families about their experience.
Mr. Jim Shanahan:
I have been quiet all day. I feel a bit inadequate because I do not work in education. However, I have been a member of the board of St. James's for 20 years and I have been the chair for 15, so I see what happens on a daily basis. What I have heard from all the members are questions about what we can do better and the cost of it. I work in the public service. I work for the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. A big buzz word in the public service is "innovation". What these people are saying is that the system is broken and is not working. We have too many different agencies, budgets and other things that are not joined up and are not causing a good outcome. The people who are suffering are the children and the families of the most vulnerable. What innovation would mean in this context is leadership and commitment from central Government. We need to get stakeholders into a room and around a table to discuss the needs of the children, the best therapies and resources for them, and then to develop a model that would work for everybody.
Nothing ever works perfectly but if a model is developed that all agencies are committed to, then you start discussing the cost of providing that solution and how to allocate it across the agencies. It is not rocket science, as Mr. O'Neill said. It is to get all the stakeholders together and have a commitment to develop a model that will work and give a better outcome for children and families because they are the people who do it. These two schools are amazing examples of what can be done with limited resources by being very creative. With more resources and joined-up thinking applied across all schools in the system, there would be a much better outcome for all of the children who need it.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I have a few questions for the witnesses from Corpus Christi. Deputy Ó Murchú put it well. The questions we were going to ask have been answered. Will they tell us more about the HAPPEE programme and the sky is the limit initiative mentioned earlier?
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
The HAPPEE initiative is an example of joining up the dots in an innovative way. For a relatively small investment, you get big outcomes. The school of allied health in the University of Limerick is aligned with the local children's disability network team - funding was secured through the regeneration programme - and six of the most disadvantaged schools in the country, which are screaming for supports for children with additional needs. You align all of that and you get fabulous outcomes for children. From a university perspective, they are looking for clinical placements for their trainee speech and language therapists and occupational therapists so it also works from a pragmatic perspective. It gives them real-life experience of going into schools and engaging with parents. It even futureproofs therapeutic services and supports because it creates very well-rounded speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists, teacher capacity is built and children get the necessary supports.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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Mr. O'Neill mentioned the Limerick economic and social intervention fund.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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As Mr. O'Neill said, initially it was €4 million a number of years ago and now it is down to €1.8 million. It will be practically gone by 2028 or 2029 with no commitment to give more.
Mr. Tiernan O'Neill:
Within that money, €600,000 was ring-fenced and over 1,000 children received therapeutic supports in various schools through play therapy and occupational and speech therapy. Over 1,000 children were helped with a €600,000 investment a year. If you do the mathematics, it is crazy to see that fund disappearing.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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It is incredible. I thank Mr. O'Neill. Would anybody like to make a brief comment? We are running out of time.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I am big into brevity, me.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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We are really out of time now, so very briefly.
Gillian Toole (Meath East, Independent)
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I am wondering how we can move forward because this is extremely powerful. There is a new committee in the Department of the Taoiseach. I cannot remember the title. Can we convene another meeting as a matter of urgency with the Minister, Deputy McEntee, the Minister of State, Deputy Michael Moynihan, and whoever is on that committee?
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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I do not want to interrupt but we can discuss that in private session as well later.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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In fairness to Deputy Toole, she is not wrong in that regard. I would like to get more information - some has been given - about the sort of figures we are talking about on what money the witnesses are providing what service. We can put that up against the CDNTs and whatever else. It would probably fit on a single page. This is making an argument that is already won but we need to move on this. My fear is these 45 schools will be inundated with applications from here on in because people will say that is where to go because their children can get the therapies there. There are many other issues to discuss.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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There are lots of issues.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I wish to ask Inclusion Ireland about the decision-making process. What are their thoughts? How can it be ensured someone would not be influenced by someone - a family member or whoever - with a hidden agenda?
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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About themselves going forward.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I think Ms McDonagh said something in the opening statement with regard to-----
Ms Lucinda Murrihy:
At the moment, when children come up against barriers, the only process is complaints go through the school. Children can complain to the ombudsman but they must first go through a lengthy process that can be biased. It is important there is an independent mechanism for children's voices to be heard. With the questions that came up today, the answers sit within children's experiences. In any other sector, complaints are very important because it is an opportunity to learn. A children's advocacy service is key as well so that children's voices are heard and policy decisions are based on those voices, which are currently not heard.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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They are directly involved.
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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That concludes our discussion for today.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Can we get that information?
Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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We will chase that up. I would like to have had a second round for everybody but we ran out of time. I think we would all agree this is one of the most powerful meetings we have had since the committee was established. I thank the witnesses for coming and giving their time. I know the lads from Moyross left at 4 or 5 a.m. this morning to get here on time. Well done to them. I propose that we publish the opening statements on the committee's website. Is that agreed? Agreed. I thank Ms McDonagh and Ms Murrihy from Inclusion Ireland, Mr. O'Neill and Dr. Liston from Corpus Christi Primary School and Mr. Shanahan and Mr. Cronin from St. James’ Primary School. I thank them all for their contributions. We will now go into private session to deal with housekeeping matters. Is that agreed? Agreed.